Simone: Reality and Fantasy in Hollywood (2002)

This article reflects a screening of an unfinished cut of Simone and is not a review of the finished film.
SDG

By 2010, claimed British futurist Ian Pearson
earlier this year in a list of technology-related predictions,
the world’s highest-paid celebrity will not be a human being, but
a computer-generated synthespian, and up to 25% of the faces seen
on television will be completely synthetic.

Simone — or S1m0ne as it’s also written — is a
satiric look at the beginnings of such a future, from
writer-director Andrew Niccol (The Truman Show,
Gattaca). The title character — whose name is an
abbreviation of "Simulation One" — is a computer-generated
actress who’s taken for the real thing after a desperate
Hollywood producer named Viktor Taransky (Al Pacino) uses her to
finish his make-or-break movie and forgets to tell anyone that
she’s not real. Targets of the film’s satire include the cult of
celebrity, Hollywood superficiality, and the movie industry’s
preoccupation with digital technology.

The first line of the film’s closing credits read,
"Introducing S1m0ne as Herself." At the time of the early-look
screening I attended, no further information about "Simone" was
readily available. The movie’s production notes, website, and
Internet Movie Database entry were
all silent about who, or what, Simone might be.

So, is Simone finally the real fake thing? After the hubbub
over the remarkable but far from persuasive "synthespians" in
Final Fantasy: The
Spirits Within — which, flawed as they were, were
certainly much more realistic than the human characters in any
previous computer-generated movie — has the technology finally
reached the point where a completely persuasive fantasy actress
can now be incorporated into a film, even if she has to play a
computer-generated character with limited screen time and
interaction with other characters?

The answer, as it turns out, is no. Simone has at last been
revealed as Canadian model and first-time actress Rachel Roberts.
The irony is striking: In the movie, fictional director Viktor
Taransky has a CGI actress that he bills as flesh and blood; in
real life, director Andrew Nichol has a flesh-and-blood actress
that he bills as CGI.

The parallels don’t stop there. The on-screen shenanigans
perpetrated by Taransky in an effort to convince his coworkers of
Simone’s reality seem to have been bizarrely echoed on the
real-life set of Niccol’s film.

In the movie, Taransky persuades Simone’s
"co-stars" that Simone is a Garbo-like recluse who
prefers to act in solitude and afterwards be digitally integrated
with the other cast members in post-production. Taransky also
hires a Simone look-alike (Claudia Jordan) to dash from a limo
into a hotel to help perpetuate the illusion of Simone’s
reality.

The reality behind the camera was almost equally strange:
Rachel Roberts was reportedly smuggled in and out of the studio
wearing wigs and other disguises in order to hide her
participation in the film, and on the set she was actually passed
off as "the stand-in" for the synthespian who
would ultimately be seen in the finished film.

Still another point of contact, obviously unintentional: From
what little we see in the movie of Taransky’s awful-looking
fictional projects, their supposed critical and popular success
is clearly a Hollywood pipe dream. The real movie may be more
entertaining, but if Nichol hoped for anything like similar
success with Simone, he was living in a fantasy of his
own.

The revelation that Simone is not after all the latest
breakthrough in computer imaging, while not the movie’s only
drawback, or even its most compelling one, is undeniably part of
the problem — and herein lies a paradox.

One of the many ideas fluttering around in the background of
Simone is this: Studios may find synthespians in many ways
preferable to the real thing — after all, they don’t make
outrageous demands about trailer size or on-set
perks; they don’t quarrel over creative differences; they never
need a stuntman or a body double — but there’s something about a
passionate human performance that can’t be replicated. A brief,
low-key set piece, in which a real actress (Winona Ryder)
auditioning for Taransky generates startling emotional power in
just a few lines, underscores the value of the humanity behind
the performance.

Like most movie lovers, I don’t like the idea of
flesh-and-blood actors being supplanted by digital automatons. So
why is the fact that the real star of this movie isn’t a
synthespian after all, but flesh and blood, a letdown?

Because, for one thing, she isn’t the star, or even a
character at all. Taransky, not Simone, is the protagonist of
Simone; Simone herself, quite rightly, is a mere cipher, a
gimmick — and, while I may not be crazy about the idea a
synthespian trying to pass as a full-blooded human being, there’s
nothing especially interesting about a human being playing a
gimmick either. If ever there was a role for a computer-generated
character, this was it.

Had Simone been a real gimmick, instead of just a coy
marketing stunt, she would have been quite a bit more
interesting. At least then she would have offered an opportunity
to showcase the latest technological advances, to give audiences
a chance to marvel at Hollywood’s digital wizardry without having
to worry about whether or not we would care about the character,
the way we’re meant to care about human characters.

But it’s more than that. A timeless bit of storytelling advice
is: "Show, don’t tell." Actually showing us a truly
bleeding-edge synthespian would have made Nichol’s point far more
effectively than anything his characters might be trying to tell
us.